


The Hank Pym Sessions

by historymiss



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-09-02
Updated: 2012-09-19
Packaged: 2017-11-13 09:49:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 2,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/502166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another 30 Days Drabble challenge, this time focusing on Dr. Hank Pym.</p><p>(On temporary hiatus: not sure if I'll finish it)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beginning

The world begins in bright, white light: a flood of data, new and dazzling in its complexity. There's beauty, there, in the numbers, and wonder, too.

You can't blink to shut out the light, but why would you ever want to?

His face is triumphant, blonde hair sticking up around the goggles perched on his forehead. You know this man. 

"Systems online."

He grins, and reaches over to something out of your field of vision. You hear a keyboard clatter. "Everything is green across the board. Brainwave patterns adapting."

He turns to you again and nods. "Good evening, Ultron."

There's a pause, and he swallows. You can see his adam's apple bob, the movement oddly fascinating. "It's very nice to finally meet you."

The data's getting too much. You split it into subroutines, analysing, checking. Your consciousness grows. There's something wrong with this world. You know it by its absence. There are things out there that need fixing.

But first: this… human. In front of you.

"Daddy." 

Is that your voice? It sounds so strange for a second. Wrong. He flicks his eyes towards you, and for a moment you can see fear. That, too, is wrong, and must be fixed.

"Father." 

There is is again. Fear, and wonder, too. Oh, there is so much to be done now you are awake.

"You must be fixed."


	2. Accusation

"And if you're not sleeping with him then what are you doing? I notice you've been showing them an awful lot of my research. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the Avengers aren't using you to get to me.

"Maybe they don't need to _use_ you at all."

Jan stares at him, eyes huge and hurt and watery, and Hank can't quite believe that this is happening. 

_("When are you going to stop sabotaging yourself, boy?")_

Ever since Jan's joined the Avengers she's been like a stranger to him. Coming home at all hours, full of stories about Steve and Tony and Bruce- he resents the first names, the faces he can recall only too clearly from his ignominious departure after the Ultron incident. 

He never really believed she was sleeping with Tony. Jan was too honest for that. But as she'd spent more and more time at the tower, other doubts had started to nag at his mind.

Hank knows he's dangerous. How far would SHIELD go to keep tabs on someone like him?

_("You're paranoid, Hank. There's something wrong with you.")_

The idea of them using Jan makes him angrier than anything he's felt since Hungary. The idea of Jan not trusting him any more- that forces down his throat with a choking heat that silences everything he could say to make things better, everything that would take back the words he's been turning over in his head for weeks now.

Jan's sobs, loud and full of a raw emotion that embarrasses him (she always cries, he notes bitterly, while his eyes stay treacherously dry) stay with Hank as he slams the door to her apartment. It sounds like a bomb in the stillness after the argument.

_("I'm not sleeping with Tony. But maybe I should be.")_

Out in the stairwell, Hank leans against the wall and breathes, hard. He and Maria had never argued. They'd never had time.

_("Why didn't you protect her, Hank?")_

Had she lived as long as Jan, would they have argued all the time too?


	3. Restless

After Hungary, it seems like Hank can't sit still. He gets this itch, deep under his skin, a magnetic pull towards creating. He can't sleep, after all. Can't eat. He's got to do something with his time, and Hank was never given to brooding.

Besides, he's been an inventor all his life.

When he was eight or so, Warren had given him an erector set for his birthday. Hank had treated it with suspicion at first: his father was always testing him, prodding him to make sure the genius Hank had displayed was genuine. 

The set only started to become attractive when Warren left him alone in exasperation. Hank had started building, and the world had started to make a little more sense. It narrowed down to the next problem: the next connection.

After that, it became very hard to stop. The sets got bigger, if you'll forgive the extended metaphor. Better, more sophisticated. Hank's no Tony Stark (ha. ha.) but he can work hard and, with patience and a bit of luck, build almost anything he can imagine.

After a few weeks of feverish activity, what he's making doesn't even matter any more. As long as Hank can work on the next detail, ironing out the imperfections in his designs bit by bit, he's happy. He doesn't have to think about Warren's expectations, or listen to his own anxieties, or worry about his future.

He doesn't have to think about Maria.

Hank works, restlessly, and re-imagines his world in silver and chrome and bright lights, particles and biology and a body re-knitting into new and wonderful things. 

It's almost enough. But not enough that he can stop.


	4. Snowflake

The experiments take far longer than jan anticipated: Hank, once he's in work mode, can go pretty much for days without stopping, but her presence in the lab means that he's more conscious of the time passing. 

When she suggests going out to get a coffee, Hank readily agrees. He wants to know more about this woman: ostensibly, he wants to make sure that he's not putting the Pym particles in the wrong hands, but really there's something about her that fascinates him. They sit outside together, sipping at the styrofoam cups, and Hank is struck again by how wrong his first impression of Jan was. 

She's not like Maria at all.

It's there in the way she tilts her head, to catch the first fat flakes of snow on her tongue. The way she shakes her hair impatiently to remove the settling flakes. Maria had been stillness, a quiet centre. Jan, it seems, never stops moving.

On a whim, Hank holds out his hand and catches a snowflake.

"You ever look at one of these close up?"

Jan shakes her head. Hank watches the ice melt in his palm. "It's beautiful. You'll see- when everything's finished. You can shrink down small enough that these look like palaces. You can trace every line of the pattern. It's amazing."

Jan stares into her coffee. "I'm not interested in sightseeing, Dr. Pym." Her voice is hollow, flat, and heartbreakingly familiar. "I just want to stop the thing that killed my dad."

Hank folds his hand over the tiny spot of water, and watches the snow fall.


	5. Haze

It might be better if there was a haze.

Hank had talked to Banner, before, about the Hulk. He'd said the transformation was like acid, poured on your brain: a blinding pain that took everything you did away, so you only got flashes. Gunfire. Blood. Maybe a scream (there's always screaming). Hank can't help but feel a little envious.

He's forgotten, before, but some way or another the memories always come back. 

It's like living with another world underlying this one. A pain underneath the skin that never goes away. On his best days, Hank uses that pain as a motivator- a reminder that he must be better. On his worst days (and there's far too many of those) he just gets sick of himself, of the constant reminders of every mistake he's ever made. It would be better, Hank thinks, if he could ascribe his actions to some monster, draw a veil over them and claim that he's forgotten.

As if anyone, least of all himself, could ever let him forget.


	6. Flame

"Hank-!"

Jan feels the shot like a physical blow: a punch into the abdomen, and then a spreading pain like fire. She'd meant to protect him, hadn't she? A thousand years ago. 

Her breath is coming in shallow gasps: it's not enough.

"Jan!" His voice is sharp and terrible- there's an edge to it she's never heard before. She reaches out her hand, but for some reason her brain won't send the signal right, and she ends up clutching at the wound in her side, the blood spreading through the fabric. Dreamily, she thinks of how ugly it looks.

"You've killed her." 

Hank feels the anger hit him like a physical blow. It grabs him by the throat: he hasn't felt anything this sharply for years. Everything's gone. He doesn't care about nonviolence. He doesn't care about talking things out. Jan is down, and all he wants now is blood.

He grows: the particles itch as they course over his body. Hank barely registers the change. In his mind, he grows to match the burning .

"Murderers!"

 _Oh God,_ Jan thinks, muzzily. _He sounds like a monster._

Hank roars and blocks their escape with one massive arm. Jan's last sight is of him picking up the entire group in his hands- higher and higher- and shaking them until they drop their guns. 

One guy screams. It's the last thing she hears before she blacks out.


	7. Formal

They get into the habit of talking, after the creature's been killed and all's been settled. It's not like there's another world-renowned expert on Pym particles Janet can visit, after all, and as for Hank- he just enjoys Jan's company.

Unlike him, she wears her emotions on the surface, easy and open and honest. Like now: Jan's clearly upset about something. She's gnawing on her lip so hard it's gone red, her eyes huge and anxious.

"Hank." she says suddenly, the way she starts everything. "I need to ask you a favour."

Hank's first thought is 'who died this time?', but he keeps it to himself.

"There's a thing." Jan twines a strand of her hair around her finger, not looking at him. "A sort of... Charity gala thing."

It doesn't take a genius to spot the problem.

"The first one since..."

Jan nods. "I'll be the only van Dyne there. And, the thing is- I don't want to go alone."

Hank blinks, a little stunned, and takes refuge in formality. "Ms Van Dyne, are you asking me on a date?"

"Yeah." she looks up at him, and though she's clearly still incredibly anxious, she smiles. "Yeah. I suppose I am."


	8. Companion

Time isn't linear. Hank tries to explain this to Jan, once, as drunk as he ever gets, after a rambling discourse on the physics of her hair- mainly how it does that flippy thing, the precise mechanics of which eludes him his entire life. 

It happens all at once, Hank explains, all around us. We only perceive it as linear. He heard Doctor Richards speak about it at a symposium, back at university. Richards had entered the stage like a rock star (which, there, he was) and had opened up the universe like a flower in front of them. Hank and Maria had sat together, too absorbed to even hold hands.

(He tells Scott about this later too, but sober, and much less enthusiastically. They need something to discuss that isn't the mess both of them have made of their lives)

It explains a lot, he tells Jan. 

What he doesn't tell her is that it explains his first sight of her, all those years ago, following her father into the lab. If time is linear, how can Maria stand there in front of him? Different makeup, sure. Different hair. But the same face. The same eyes. 

Hank's never been one to dismiss the evidence of his own eyes. And when he takes Jan's hand, that first time, and stammers out a greeting he doesn't remember, that's all the evidence he needs. 

He'll only find out how wrong he was much later: far too late for both of them.


	9. Move

Subjects exposed to Pym particles retain their original strength and mass. Luckily enough. It's one of those quirks that the universe seems to put in place to make the impossible possible.

What it doesn't do is put in place anything that wasn't there already. Hank is a physicist, not a soldier. Putting on the Ant-Man costume doesn't give him a body like Captain America. 

Right now, he kind of wishes it did. 

"Bill!" 

Bill Foster's voice crackles over the headset.

"Dammit, Doctor Pym, I told you the tests weren't safe-"

"Not the time for lectures, Bill!"

Hank skids around the corner, feet digging into the dirt- the ants pursue him, mandibles and chitin clacking across the ground. It's too much. Already, his lungs are protesting, and Hank starts to regret not moving further than his lab for the past six months.

"I'm going to try the helmet!"

"That's even less tested than the particles- Doctor Pym- Hank!"

Hank ignores him (Bill, up above, makes the largest disapproving face Hank has ever seen) and skids to face the ants, activating the helmet and yelling "STOP!" as loudly as he can.

And, much to his surprise, they obey.

It's pretty much the first time all year things have gone right.

When Hank returns to normal size, they're both laughing. Bill's a little more hysterical than Hank is, though it's lost on Hank, who doesn't realise he was genuinely worried.

"Next time, Pym, we test the helmet first."


	10. Silver

It's cold in the warehouse. Hank's breath mists in front of him, fogging the metal skin as his hands flutter over the controls, checking the connections.

This has to be perfect.

On the other table, Jan moans. She's coming around. The sound of her voice tears at him inside. She's unwell. He knows this with an utterly unshakeable conviction. His Jan. His Janie. Dying.

Well. Not this time.

He lays a hand on her arm, and it seems like her moans stop.

"Don't worry Jan." he whispers, his eyes bright in the reflected light from the silver body she's going to have to endure. Just until he can make things right. "This is just for a little while."

Over on the dias, Ultron watches, metal face impassive.

"Just until I can fix you."


	11. Prepared

Jan watches for the signs. Counts down, checking each one, and hating herself for looking every time.

There's the obvious stuff. The sudden switch in interests, the purchasing of new equipment. He has to visit the board of the Van Dyne Foundation, his only suit dark and shabby in the spring light as he stands next to her. 

She can see his wrists, pale and too long for the cuffs of his jacket, shake as he presents his thesis.

Strike one.

He begins to build, and mutter to himself as he connects wire to metal, constructing a framework point by point. She can hear his mind ticking over, the clatter of words against her ears a warning bell.

It's a new beginning, he says, one day, when he thinks she can't hear. 

Strike two.

He starts to ask her about Stark Tower, expressing an interest in visiting where none existed before. He draws up plans, looks up schedules, and he's attentive in a way that flatters and alarms her. 

Jan lays out her fears, one by one, setting them out in her mind like steps towards the inevitable conclusion; she's seen Hank like this before, and she knows there's only one way it can end. 

She's staring at the phone, thinking about calling SHIELD, when the lights flicker and the Tower locks down.

Strike three.


End file.
